Impact damage and repair of composite structures

This paper gives an overview of the work carried out in a GARTEUR (Group for Aeronautical Research and Technology in Europe) program, under the chairmanship of the author, to develop and validate analytical and numerical methods to characterise real impact damage in composite structures, particularly those designed to sustain load in a postbuckled state, and to study the durability of bonded repairs. GARTEUR is an inter-governmental agreement between the seven European countries with the largest direct employment in the Aerospace industry, to mobilise scientific and technical knowledge between the member countries. A number of Action Groups have been launched, since GARTEUR’s inception in the early 1970s, to address specific technical issues of interest to the participating members. The research presented in this paper was performed under Action Group 28 with partners from ONERA, EADS-CCR (France), DLR, AIRBUS-Deutschland, EADS-M (Germany), CIRA (Italy), INTA (Spain), SICOMP, Saab, (Sweden), NLR (The Netherlands), QinetiQ, BAE Systems, Imperial College London and the University of Sheffield (United Kingdom). The Action Group tasks were divided into four Work Elements (WEs): WE1-Prediction and characterisation of impact damage, WE2- Postbuckling with delamination, WE3-Repair and WE4-Fatigue. This paper outlines the main developments and achievements within each Work Element.

SPHERE: Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education

SPHERE (Stormont Parliamentary Hansards: Embedded in Research and Education) was a JISC-funded project based at King’s College, London and Queen’s University, Belfast, working in Partnership with the Northern Ireland Assembly Library, and the NIA Official Report (Hansard). Its purpose was to assess the use, value and impact of The Stormont Papers digital resource, and to use the results of this assessment to make recommendations for a series of practical approaches to embed the resource within teaching, learning and research among the wider user community. The project began in November 2010 and was concluded in April 2010.

A series of formal reports on the project are published by JISC online at http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/digitisation/impactembedding/sphere.aspx

SPHERE Impact analysis summary
Portable Document Format
SPHERE interviews report
SPHERE Outreach use case
SPHERE research use case
SPHERE teaching use_case
SPHERE web survey report
SPHERE web analysis

Book Review - Social Work Under Pressure: How to Overcome Stress, Fatigue and Burnout in the Workplace

Book review: Social Work Under Pressure: How to Overcome Stress, Fatigue and Burnout in the Workplace, by Kate van Heugten, London and Philadelphia, Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2011, 224 pp., 

Old Town Glasgow: Squalor, Agitation and City Improvements

In 1862, Glasgow Corporation initiated the first of a series of three legislative acts which would become known collectively as the City Improvements Acts. Despite having some influence on the nature of the built fabric on the expanding city as a whole, the most extensive consequences of these acts was reserved for one specific area of the city, the remnants of the medieval Old Town. As the city had expanded towards all points of the compass in a regular, grid-iron structure throughout the nineteenth century, the Old Town remained singularly as a densely wrought fabric of medieval wynds, vennels, oblique passageways and accelerated tenementalisation. Here, as the rest of the city began to assume the form of an ordered entity, visible and classifiable, one could still find and addresses such as ‘Bridgegate, No. 29, backland, stair first left, three up, right lobby, door facing’ (quoted in Pacione, 1995).

Unsurprisingly, this place, where proximity to the midden (dung-heap) was considered an enviable position, was seen by the authorities as a major health hazard and a source not only of cholera, but also of the more alarming typhoid epidemic of 1842. Accordingly, the demolitions which occurred in the backlands of the Old Town under the first of the acts, the Glasgow Police Act of 1862, were justified on health and medical grounds. But disease was not the only social problem thought to issue from this district. Reports from social reformers including Fredrick Engels suggested that the decay of the area’s physical fabric could be extended to the moral profile of its inhabitants. This was in such a state of degeneracy that there were calls for a nearby military barracks to be relocated to more salubrious climes because troops were routinely coming into contact ‘with the most dissolute and profligate portion of the population’ (Peter Clonston, Lord Provost, June 1861). Perhaps more worrying for the city fathers, however, was that the barracks’ arsenal was seen as a potential source of arms for the militant and often illegal cotton workers’ unions and organisations who inhabited the Old Town as well as the districts to the east. In fact, the Old Town and East End had been the site of numerous working class actions and riots since 1787, including a strike of 60,000 workers in 1820, 100,000 in 1838, and the so-called Bread Riots of 1848 where shouts of ‘Vive La Revolution’ were reported in the Gallowgate.

The events in Paris in 1848 precipitated Baron Hausmann’s interventions into that city. The boulevards were in turn visited by members of Glasgow Corporation and ultimately, it can be argued, provided an example for Old Town Glasgow. This paper suggests that the city improvement acts carried a similarly complex and pervasive agenda, one which embodied not only health, class conflict and sexual morality but also the more local condition of sectarianism. And, like in Paris, these were played out spatially in a extensive reconfiguration of the urban fabric of the Old Town which, through the creation of new streets and a railway yard, not only made it more amenable to large scale military manoeuvres but also, opened up the area to capitalist accumulation. By the end of the works, the medieval heritage of the Old Town had been almost completely razed, the working class and Catholic East End had, through the insertion of the railway yard, been isolated from the city centre and approximately 70,000 people had been made homeless.

Design of a Virtual Reality Framework for Maintainability and assemblability test of complex systems

This paper presents a unique environment whose features are able to satisfy requirements for both virtual maintenance and virtual manufacturing through the conception of original virtual reality (VR) architecture. Virtual Reality for the Maintainability and Assemblability Tests (VR_MATE) encompasses VR hardware and software and a simulation manager which allows customisation of the architecture itself as well as interfacing with a wide range of devices employed in the simulations. Two case studies are presented to illustrate VR_MATE's unique ability to allow for both maintainability tests and assembly analysis of an aircraft carriage and a railway coach cooling system respectively. The key impact of this research is the demonstration of the potentialities of using VR techniques in industry and its multiple applications despite the subjective character within the simulation. VR_MATE has been presented as a framework to support the strategic and operative objectives of companies to reduce product development time and costs whilst maintaining product quality for applications which would be too expensive to simulate and evaluate in the real world.

The immediate Life support course: implementation into an undergraduate nursing programme

This paper outlines how the immediate life support (ILS) course was incorporated into an undergraduate-nursing curriculum in a university in Northern Ireland. It also reports on how the students perceived the impact of this course on their clinical practice. The aim was to develop the student’s ability to recognise the acutely ill patient and to determine the relevance of this to clinical practice. Prior to this the ILS course was only available to qualified nurses and this paper reports on the first time students were provided with an ILS course in an undergraduate setting. The ILS course was delivered to 89 third year nursing students (Adult Branch) and comprised one full teaching day per week over two weeks. Recognised Advanced Life Support (ALS) instructors, in keeping with the United Kingdom Resuscitation Council guidelines, taught the students. Participants completed a 17 item questionnaire which comprised an open-ended section for student comment. Questionnaire data was analysed descriptively using SSPSS version 15.0. Open-ended responses from the questionnaire data was analysed by content and thematic analysis. Results Student feedback reported that the ILS course helped them understand what constituted the acutely ill patient and the role of the nurse in managing a deteriorating situation. Students also reported that they valued the experience as highlighting gaps in their knowledge Conclusion. The inclusion of the ILS course provides students with necessary skills to assess and manage the deteriorating patient. In addition the data from this study suggest the ILS course should be delivered in an inter-professional setting – i.e taught jointly with medical students. References: Department of Health & Quality Assurance Agency (2006). Department of Health Phase 2 benchmarking project – final report. Gloucester: Department of Health, London and Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education

Getting off the escalator? A study of Scots out-migration from a global city region

Something new is happening to reverse the historical trend of skilled Scots moving to London for career progression. The Scottish population of London and the South East is falling and this despite Scots enjoying continued occupational success within the South East labour market. The authors ask why Scots are leaving the UK's main escalator region and then investigate how these migration changes can best be theorised relative to literature on the mobility of the 'new service class'. Building on Fielding's escalator region hypothesis, the authors report on recent research on longer distance flows out of the UK's main escalator region. They advance the critique of the escalator region hypothesis set out by Findlay et al and ask why people would leave a global city offering good opportunities for occupational mobility. Demographic regime change provides only a partial answer. Other explanations can be found in the changing mobilities of the new service class as they engage in what Smith has defined as 'translocal' and 'transnational' urbanism. The authors argue that Scotland's changing relationship with London and the South East may be representative of a wider set of changes in migration linkages between regional economies and global cities.